In summer 2018 the Lebensgemeinschaft Höhenberg in Bavaria celebrated their 40th anniversary, and I attended this event as the proud mother of my son who had joined this community as a young adult in 2011. Andreas suffered from lack of oxygen during the birth process and is a “person with disability”. He will never be able to live unassisted – but during his first years in Höhenberg, when he turned from teenager to adult – he found out that he has very many talents and he got the right assistance to develop them. These days he works in the carpentry workshop at Höhenberg, he married his girlfriend last summer, he lives in the community and will hopefully grow old there, always receiving just as much help as he needs whilst being encouraged to do as much as he can unassisted. He experiences what during the 40^th anniversary was put into these words: “Our goal is to keep the idea of inclusion alive. Our mission statement begins with the words, ‘We believe that every human being is a completely equal spiritual being.’ … A special element of the care we provide is the coexistence of people with and without assistance needs”.

So, for my son being in Germany, his birth country, offers the living conditions he needs. Greece, however, where he grew up together with his sister and his parents, is in this respect many years behind. Greece has signed the “United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities “ (UNCRPD), just like Germany, but the Greek reality is still far away from guaranteeing persons with disabilities equal treatment, non-discrimination and access to all aspects of society, including education, employment, healthcare and transport – as the letters of the law put it. Once the children with special needs turn into teenagers and then young adults, and they finish their compulsory school years, there is nothing like the Lebensgemeinschaft Höhenberg in place for them here in Greece. Certainly no vocational training whatsoever, no sheltered workshops, no jobs… All these young people with their many talents spend most of their days, most of their lives, at home. They lose the social contacts they had during their school years, they cannot perform their hobbies any more. If they had gained a bit of self-confidence at school they gradually lose that, too, because there is nothing for them to do, to feel useful, to earn some praise, let alone money.

Living in Greece is for me, like for my friend Waltraud Sperlich, a dream come true. Waltraud moved to Greece about 50 years ago; my husband and me and our two children made Greece our home country 30 years ago. Waltraud and me still love being here, although we no longer look at the country and its inhabitants with tourists` eyes.  Speaking the language, having Greek friends and both being people with a social streak we realised that a lot is going wrong in the Greek system. One huge problem is the lack of social care in Greece and that includes the lack of social care for handicapped people. Because of my son my heart beats very strong for this group of people and I knew immediately that they would be our “target”, when in 2016 somebody offered us 50, 000 Euros “to do something for young people in Kalamata”. This somebody is a German whose uncle was one of the Greek shipping magnets. The nephew wanted to give a bit of his inherited money to a welfare project in Kalamata, his uncle`s home town. How he found us, Waltraud and me, and why he trusted us to realise such a project is another story. But the result was LYSOs Garden, an educational gardening workshop for young adults with handicaps, which we opened in Autumn 2016. It was certainly the right thing to do – we started with 12 young women and men, but had a long waiting list from the beginning.  Now nearly 40 attend our workshops – yes, workshops, plural, because these days we also offer music therapy, pottery and sewing. As a result of our steady growth we are now taking a big step forward: we are founding a Day Centre for adults with handicaps. On 5500 square metres of land right outside Kalamata, with a huge stone building to accommodate the workshops, with enough land around to carry on our gardening workshop, and with an open air theatre that offers a multitude of options for its future use. It will be called LYSOs Nest, it will be the first Day Centre for handicapped adults on the Peloponnese, and it will be a beacon of hope that in some years` time communities like “Lebensgemeinschaft Höhenberg” will no longer be something unheard of in Greece.

All photographs provided with thanks by Maelig Sebilotte and Rainer Leifried.